Former Selangor MB Abdul Khalid Ibrahim declared last week that the Selangor government has no power to cancel a federal government project and cautioned that the Selangor government was subject to Article 9 of the federal constitution.

Khalid Ibrahim made this statement in relation to the controversial Kinrara-Damansara Expressway (Kidex) project that was scrapped by the Selangor government on Feb 16, 2015.

With due respect to Khalid Ibrahim, I believe he was wrongly quoted or advised about Article 9, which deals with the banishment and exclusion of a citizen from the federation. It is not a provision to be used to compel a state government to allow a federal project to proceed without going through the due process of town and country planning.

I suspect Khalid Ibrahim was in fact referring to Schedule 9, List II of the federal constitution instead.

Assuming this is what Khalid Ibrahim was referring to with regard to the threat of legal action from the federal government, I would like to assure him that Selangor is very safe from such legal threats based on the work that BN did before Pakatan Rakyat came into power.

The Selangor State Structure Plan 2020 (SSSP) is a translation of two federal government policies formulated under the Town and Country Planning Act: the National Physical Plan and the National Urbanisation Policy.

The SSSP is a statutory document that was approved and gazetted on 14 June 2007 after public participation and consultation.

The SSSP has two basic objectives:

1.To achieve future development goals suitable for the Selangor state until 2020;

2.To present views and proposals for solving development problems currently experienced.

As a plan for sustainable development, the document provided solutions to reduce traffic congestion by imposing a carrying capacity limit on every town with the specific purpose to support the Greater Kuala Lumpur Conurbation.

This limitation restricts the population growth for areas stretching from Kuala Selangor in the north to Port Dickson in the south and includes Bentong together with Putrajaya and Wilayah Persekutuan to 8.46 million by the year 2020.

The idea behind the growth limitation on townships is to ensure that areas outside the Klang Valley are developed and pressure on saturated townships like Petaling Jaya, Subang Jaya, Shah Alam and Klang are left alone as the existing infrastructure can no longer cope with the demand.

Kidex is found nowhere in this document and is therefore not part of the joint federal and Selangor government-approved solution to resolve traffic problems.

In fact, the SSSP is evidence that the Selangor government under Khalid Ibrahim’s leadership had failed to implement proper development practices that was agreed upon by the public.

A good government is measured by its ability to put right what is wrong and is accountable and transparent to its people in implementing mega-infrastructure development projects, not by arbitrarily quoting the law and holding the public to ransom.